Re: Re: IMPORTANT: (possibly) incompatible Change

[Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com>]

On Apr 6, 2010, at 6:03 PM, Karsten Heymann wrote:

> Hi Carsten,
>
> Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Apr 6, 2010, at 2:30 PM, Karsten Heymann wrote:
>>> Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
>>>> \usepackage[AUTO]{inputenc}
>>>> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
>>>> \usepackage{graphicx}
>>>> \usepackage{longtable}
>>>> \usepackage{float}
>>>> \usepackage{wrapfig}
>>>> \usepackage{soul}
>>>> \usepackage{latexsym}
>>>> \usepackage{amssymb}
>>>> \usepackage{hyperref}
>>
>> Do you have any recommendations for the sequence in which these
>> packages should be called?  Or does that make no difference at all?
>> Does any of these cause problems if they are called twice (say I
>> add them, but users have them configured already?)
>
> The only critical one is hyperref, which should always be loaded last
> (see
> http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref/doc/manual.html#x1-30002) 
> .
>
>> What is is really changing due to these last two
>> settings (microtype) and tolerance, could you explain in a bit more
>> detail?
>
> I will try to explain it in my own poor words. microtype activates
> advanced functions of the pdftex compiler (nowadays the standard TeX
> compiler used by all distributions) to perform various subtle output
> modifications, like shifting letters a tiny bit into the right  
> margin so
> that the margin looks *visually* aligned. Also it stretches and pulls
> letters for tiny amounts so words fit better into paragraphs without
> standing into the margin.
>
> This is also the area where \tolerance takes action. It's a low level
> TeX directive that controls how much the whitespace between words may
> differ in width when typesetting a justified paragraph (I'm not sure
> what the correct translation of the German word "Blocksatz" is).  
> It's a
> number in the range between 0 and 9999 (plus the special 10.000  
> meaning
> infinite for TeX ;-) ). The standard value 200 is way much too
> perfectionist for normal day-to-day typesetting, especially when  
> writing
> in languages where typical words are much longer then in English, like
> German for example. Normal Desktop Text processors always operate in
> "10.000"-Mode, meaning there's an infinite amount of whitespace  
> allowed
> between words, with the result of possibly large holes between the  
> words
> to keep the right margin aligned. TeX on the other hand will deny to
> typeset paragraphs when it cannot find a solution (for the full
> paragraph!) inside it's tolerance limits and write words into the  
> right
> margin so the author can manually fix the situation (rephrase, fix
> hyphenation, ...). Tolerance values up to 2000 still look much better
> than anything from Word/OOo and reduce the need to manually correct
> these problems (and to explain this stuff to new users).
>
>> And: Can I expect fixltx2e to be present in all distributions?
>
> Yes, it's part of the latex base packages and thus always available
> (given any not really really ancient LaTeX installation, e.g. more  
> than
> a decade).
>
>> Is \tolerance defined in microtype, or did you put these together  
>> just
>> incidentally?
>
> They are completely independent.

Thanks a lot for all this, I will follow your advice.

One final question:  Will any of these packages spoil the fun
for people who want to process through .dvi instead of directly to pdf?

>
>>> Karsten
>>
>> I really appreciate expert advice about this.  Thank you.
>
> I'm more than glad my rusty LaTeX knowledge is of any use,  
> especially to
> the awesome org-mode community (and it's even more awesome author). If
> you want advice from some *real* experts, ask in the comp.text.tex or
> the de.comp.text.tex newsgroup. That's a completely different level,  
> I'm
> just some kind of semi-power-user that had too much time on  
> university.

That is way more than I know about LaTeX/TeX internals, so fully
appropriate here.  Yes, comp.text.tex and de.comp.text.tex, I used
to hang out there more while writing reftex.el and cdlatex.el, but
always more as a reader than as a contributor.  I loved to read these
groups, that was always a high intensity place to be at.

Thanks again.

- Carsten